(Christianity Today) — If you tried to design an ideal setting for learning how to be a good neighbor, it would look a lot like a college campus.
As the president of a campus ministry, I might be a little biased in that assessment. But imagine the reality that a brand-new college student faces when they come to campus for the first time. Thousands are already there from every walk of life: athletes, musicians, activists, artists, people of different cultures and ethnicities, introverts and extroverts, people who like to party and stay out late, people who like to stay in and get up early.
All of them chose this school, but none of them chose each other. All at once, they’re thrust into a community, stuck together in dorms and classes and social clubs.
These college students have no choice but to learn to coexist. To share space and navigate conflict. To be neighbors.
There’s a durable public stereotype that members of Gen Z can’t live in neighborly ways—that they’re too anxious and fearful, too conflict avoidant and entitled. Frankly, I see something different. What I see on campus, in the students that InterVarsity and our fellow campus ministries serve, is a generation for whom neighborliness is the essence of day-to-day life, vital to navigating the tensions we’ve seen at universities in the past year.
Today’s college students have important lessons for the broader church about how to live alongside neighbors who may misunderstand them, disagree with them, or disdain them. Here are three.
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Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy
We believe Christians can be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens with those who don’t share our faith—and that we can do so within the fullness of our Christian identity.
Tom Lin serves as President and CEO of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and is author of Pursuing God’s Call (2012) and Losing Face, Finding Grace (1996). Prior to Intervarsity, Tom served as country director for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Mongolia and InterVarsity’s Vice President of Missions and Director of the Urbana Student Missions Conference. Tom has also served as a trustee on the boards of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Missio Nexus, and Leadership & Legacy Foundation. He currently serves on the boards of Fuller Theological Seminary, the Crowell Trust, and the Lausanne Movement.
